Emasculating Lethal Ideology Starts In Saudi Arabia

CDHR’s Commentary: In his annual pilgrimage speech on September 23, 2015, the Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al-Ashaikh (the highest religious authority in the land), called on Sunni Muslims to rid the world of the enemies of Islam. The Mufti insisted that, ‘Some of them {the enemies} are non-Muslims while others want to exploit Islam posing as Muslims.’ This statement is only a prelude to the Mufti’s attack on his customary targets, the Shi’a and non-Muslims whom he and his religious establishment consider heretics and blasphemers. During his dogmatic speech, the Mufti “said the Houthis {offshoot of Shi’a Islam} are a deviant and sinful group that runs counter to the ethics of Muslims.” He fictitiously claims that the Houthis ‘spread chaos in Islamic countries in a manner that gives a chance to the enemies of Islam (non-Muslims) to exploit their resources and threaten the security of neighboring countries.’

Unlike the Saudis’ globally reviled and dreaded brand of Wahhabi Islam, the small Yemeni religious minority, the Houthis, have no religious influence over or followers anywhere outside of their rugged region of Yemen. They are mostly bare-footed, ill-equipped and poverty stricken Yemeni men and women who have no money, oil, traditional force, global ideology or well-established and powerful religious institutions. Nor can they spend billions of dollars to indoctrinate and export zealots and suicide bombers throughout the world.

However, the Saudi Mufti’s pilgrimage speech on September 23 was intended to ensure the continued support of the increasingly skeptical and disapproving Saudi and other populations of the countries whose regimes were financially lured to join the trigger happy new Saudi rulers’ invasion and devastation of Yemen. To his and his handlers’ dismay, the Mufti’s speech did not seem to sway anyone other than some of his violence and intolerance advocating religious establishment.

Less than two weeks later, on October 5, a horde of the Mufti’s hard core followers signed a petition condemning Shi’a and enemies of Islam, calling on the overwhelming majority Sunni Muslims to ‘give all moral, material, political and military’ support to ISIS, Al-Nusra, Jaish Al-Islam (Army of Islam), Al-Qaeda and others in Syria, whom the Saudi clerics praised as ‘the holy warriors of Syria.’ The Saudi clerics are staunch advocates of terror campaigns against Syrian Shi’a and Christians, claiming that unless these groups are destroyed, Sunni Muslim states will fall one by one.

Ironically, the Saudi clerics and their royal allies and financiers who call on Muslims to annihilate each other and non-Muslims insist that Islam is a religion of peace, equality, justice, tolerance and the only hope to save humanity.

Muslims must decide whether their faith is a religion of peace, equality and harmony or a religion of war, injustice and inequality, as many critics of Islam charge. Muslims also have to define the phrase: “the enemies of Islam.” Are non-Muslims the enemies of Islam or are the Muslims who have committed and are currently engaged in unprecedented heinous crimes against each other the real enemies of their faith?